First Contact
by serpentnine
Summary: With organics, you took what you could get.
1. Chapter 1

For HopeofDawn, who works too hard. ) Amazing, awesome beta by White_Aster!

...

Entombed under dark glacial grind, he dreamed.

Quiet dreams, flicker-arcing and tattered wraiths that stirred on a millennial cycle, trapped in a still, still shell.

These are the things he dreamed: the cold scent of wet-rust, in air too dense with oxygen. Occasional light, filtered to a flat blue haze. A medbot crumpled on its back, attenuated legs curled in towards its thorax, dead optic fallen open. A cracking groan, the thunder of vast layers of moving ice. A phantom breath of atmosphere stirring around sensors offline for centuries. Filaments of rhinefrost growing into crystals, lining every joint of discolored armor. The slow pulse of a spinning spark, sustained on the merest droplets of fuel. Sometimes there was more light, less groaning pressure, once the echo of a measured drip. And always, always… the humid, heavy cold.

Perhaps the others dreamed too – Prime warring in the fractured dreamscape of Primes, the rest lying with ghosts, as he did. Bumblebee could not say.

Time turned, ineluctable. Eons passed. Or moments. He could not be sure of that, either.

Change came slowly under the weight of thinning ice, and the next dream was the ping of a chemoreceptor, registering changes in airborne carbon. Sometimes, a little more energon was injected into his pinched-empty fuel lines – not enough to spin up memory banks or even the basal stacks of his CPU, but it was pleasant, in a way, to dream of deep internal status reports.

It grew lighter. Code old and clinical, wrapped carefully around his transmission stem, prevented bootup even as his reserve tanks filled. But the sensors in those empty tanks knew fuel when they felt it, and now he dreamed of fire spreading through his frame. He dreamed of the stirring of nanocytes, the quickening of fluxmetal. His spark, warming, rejoiced.

The dreams flickered faster now, the ghosts thick around him. His ramboot drive, long inert and cold, heated with overwritten data. He dreamed of the withdrawal of a mainline, wires sparking as they broke connection, the first bright charge that had passed through his frame in millennia. And then he dreamed dimly of moving, of cracked sheets of ice falling away like armor he'd outgrown. He dreamed of scarred and blasted plates, heavy as ordinance shells, the weight of them making his rotators groan in the cold.

And then more ice, breaking away from the Ark's loading racks. Behind the frozen curtain, missile tubes gaped dark and empty, waiting. Perhaps it should have been strange to him, this Prime-like lucid dreaming, and his spark roused in its ancient dormancy.

His next dream was of blackness once more, echoing tightly, stygian. His emotional protocols were offline, yet even still there was a gelid kind of… disappointment.

He knew – his spark knew – that he would not dream again.

...

A flash: pressure sensors detecting enormous acceleration, then rarefied atmosphere and the tank-churning disorientation of low gravity. Then a roar began, a molten sound that screamed of heat, shuddering through his very core.

Full bootup came just as he landed.

Too much motion, too much sound, a shattering, heavy frame-thudding jolt and battle protocols flared online, cracking through cabling that smoked as the dust of centuries burned away. Too tight, limbs folded close to frame, impossible to bring up his weapons. Battle reflexes disengaged the electromagnet locks across back and shoulders, and the huge shielding plates sheared away. Light, blinding. Bumblebee fought for footing, struggled to bring his weapons to bear, half-frozen gears grinding, slipping with the effort to form the barrel of his cannon. So much noise -

- and falling. Gravity. Quite a lot of it, too. A tangle of protoform limbs, Bumblebee hit the ground again, shearing through saplings, blasting snow into the air, carving a crater a meter deep. Battle systems forced his legs under him as he tumbled, fighting momentum. Something - _organic, hostile_ - clipped his hip and he was airborne again, downhill, more hostiles streaking past on every side. His mass struck a shelf of brittle shale, scattering shards, nearly wrenching one limb from its many articulated sockets. A looming hostile reached for him, and he met it with a flash of his energon sting. The impact slammed him around, shook him to the core, deflected his mad trajectory. Bumblebee spun to a stop on his belly in a morass of semi-frozen wet organic sludge, the stuff oozing into every crevice of his body.

With a snapping, creaking groan, the huge organic began to topple down upon him, its base cut half-through. Emitting a muffled, static-laced squawk, Bumblebee scrambled to get his feet under him in the paste, to dive aside. There was no traction for his claws, and he rolled, slid, firing up into the underside of the organic.

The thing emitted a horrible, echoing moan as it cracked apart and crashed into the muck, the impact rumbling through the organic-sodden surface. Some of its branching limbs and fingers danced with fire. Hissing in fury, Bumblebee turned his cannon in warning on the rest of the organics, staggering to taloned pedes, concealing his disorientation as best he could. The point of his stinger blade glowed with energon.

The tall organics did not appear intimidated. They also - once Bumblebee's gyros stabilised - did not seem to move much.

_Lignin_, his chemoreceptors helpfully supplied, sampling the stuff that clung in chips to his own battered armor. _Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon - much of it in benzene rings - and cellulotic polysaccharide, sandwiched with dihydrogen oxide and simple sugars. Trace elements: potassium, nitrogen, sulphur..._

His chilled CPU glitched over that data for nearly a full astrosecond.

_Coal_, it concluded, finally. _Upright surface veins of low-grade coal. For primitive combustion._

_Coal rods?_ Bumblebee rebooted his optics. But the vertical veins persisted, their branched tips swaying and flexing just slightly, clawing against a sky full of stars. A low energy warning flickered in the corner of his HUD, and he turned to scan his surroundings. The strange coal veins stood in an undulating, broken expanse of dihydrogen oxide, solidified by the cold and then broken down into tiny shards and flakes that glittered in the light of a single moon. The stuff was knee-deep and mainly pure - contaminated just a little by particulate and small debris from the coal rods, but even a hand-held filter could remove that. The field stretched beyond his scanning range. This much fresh water... was worth more than a few credits on almost any market.

Several chunks of metal laying at rest some three kilometers away set him on edge for a moment, before he recognized them as segments of protoform plating, meant to protect a mech - or explosive artillery - during orbital entry. It had been hundreds of vorn since he'd fragged up a planetary landing this badly. Even an unsparked bot knew better than to disengage its plating immediately after the first bounce! But at least that explained why he felt as if he'd been dragged down one side of the Pit and up the other. Bumblebee vented quietly.

Beneath the blanket of crystallized water lay more organic matter - some of it even lower-grade coal than the veins around him, some of it nothing but short, useless chains of sugars. The air was heavy with water, a great deal of dinitrogen, carbon dioxide, and... dioxygen, so dense that it was a wonder all this coal did not combust where it stood. Perhaps the bizarre abundance of water had something to do with that? The rod which Bumblebee had shot still smoldered in chunks, but the flames seemed to be dying out. With a swift glance at his surroundings, Bumblebee initiated the stop sequence for his energon punch and downcycled his lightweight cannon. Both weapons pulled too much power to maintain - not on fuel tanks only 37.8% full. Then he hailed Teletraan.

There was no response over entangled particle transmission. While he waited for a lowbeam reply, Bumblebee pulled one leg free of the powdered water, adapting his foot from talons to a broad, flanged pede that might keep him from sinking entirely through with each step. The coal rods were quite large - a few of them bigger than Bumblebee could wrap his arms around - and solid, if slightly spongy to the touch. By Primus, where was he?

The most recent part of his archives were ragged and grainy, as if he'd offlined before managing to write all his short-term data to quantum drive. They'd been approaching a planet in search of a trace of the Allspark, though, he recalled that much. The globe had been largely blue, its atmosphere thick with water, similar to this place. But there were more products of combustion here - carbon dioxide and ash, and... Teletraan should have answered by now.

Jaws tight, Bumblebee broadened his reception spectrum.

_And tonight for your drive we have - ev-ery-body wang chung tonight! - oui, les escaliers - only seven percent if you hurry now - video gone viral - this has been the BBC world news - oh yeah baby, give it to me - dialogue with the soviet era industries - tilipobe kuno, ndi - until that accident gets cleared - seriously concerned about the spread of avian flu in south - Haiti crisis damages - yesterday on the Young and the Restless -_

Sounds and images and movement and a thousand, thousand other transmissions on long and shortwave EM frequencies, like listening to the background chatter of a full three battalions on simultaneous riotous leave. That was more Autobots than even still functioned, to Bumblebee's knowledge. And why did so many of the transmissions feature small biped organics, slender as sparklings and hauntingly mechlike? If there'd been signs of sentience during approach, he would have remembered. Prime probably wouldn't even have permitted a ground force, and...

_Optimus._

Orders, he had to have orders, there had to be a mission - he couldn't have been marooned on a dirtball, even if he was so useless as to drop his armor in the middle of orbital entry. In Bumblebee's sudden panic, his battle protocols stalled, slipped offline, and *there!* The packet of code and data wasn't located anyplace normal, like in his archives, but rather had been written directly onto his ramboot drive. It was a bizarre location for sensitive information, albeit a very, very secure one. He would have detected the packet immediately upon bootup, if the battle protocols hadn't come online first and swamped higher processing with their demands.

And... someone would've had to mainline him, to implant so much code so deeply. Not just a hardline hack, and Primus knew those were invasive enough. Ratchet maybe, or Teletraan. Or Prime. And none of those made sense, because where were they?

His confusion only grew as he set about decompressing the packet. Some of his sectors were bad, as if he hadn't properly repaired nor defragged in ages, and the rest might as well have been, for all the sense they made. Oh, the actual order was simple enough: Disperse mechabots at target sites. Stealth level alpha-twelve. Wait for further contact.

The accompanying dataset contained a list of coordinates, arranged into an order of priority. The few jotted notations were cryptic at best - 'mainframe only' or 'central generators' or 'both satellite collectors and powerline.' And the level of secrecy required by this 'mission' was the second-highest for which he was configured. Only limited and necessary contact with local species was permitted; otherwise he was to integrate physically and maintain field dampeners and comm silence. There was nothing at all in the packet regarding what the mechabots were programmed to actually do. A crude map - topographical only, slaggit - depicted a thousand or so square miles in insultingly low resolution, betraying no hint at all as to Bumblebee's present location. The whole thing looked like nothing so much as a saboteur's checklist.

A Decepticon trap? Gingerly, Bumblebee reached one talon under a chink in his chassis armor, and was met by the sharp, irritable pinpricks of at least half a dozen mechabots' spidery legs as they tried to shove organic debris and his finger away. With care, he teased one of the creatures out of its internal niche. The unsparked bot was a third the length of one of his talons, muddy, and clearly outraged, to judge by its angrily constricted optic. Most of its systems had been removed in order to house a comparatively huge uplink energy transmitter - such devices were normally tiny. It waved several thin legs at him threateningly.

Pincering it between his talontips, Bumblebee turned the bot upside down, ignoring its furious squeak. The Autobot insignia brand was clear on its underside, despite the mud and wriggling legs. /_Access code Tyger Pax twelve-nine-six-point-one one?_/ he inquired in a smooth stream of glyphs, and the bot spat back the correct numerical relay in response. Which probably meant very little, if Bumblebee had indeed been mainlined by the enemy. Thoughtfully, he let the bot clamber upright. The thing stormed its way up his arm and back into his chassis, where it continued flinging dirty, melting snow out of its niche, chittering quietly to itself.

His chromatophores had been offline for a long, long time, he realized, studying his own hand. His armor was nearly gray.

Tanks at 37.7%, now. Bumblebee was strikingly fuel-efficient, yes, but with the mechabots to maintain as well, a third of a full charge wouldn't last a millivorn. Pushing himself upright from the branching coal rod, Bumblebee chose a spot on the map which somewhat resembled his present location, then calculated the nearest target coordinates. And started walking.


	2. Chapter 2

Long-range scanning was energy-intensive, and he avoided it when he could, but the terrain here was as broken as a battlefield. Cliffs rose and canyons gaped, and in places the coal rods were clustered so thick there was no good way through at all. Small organics fled him, or blasted off overhead - a feat which he found astonishing. Bumblebee had been stationed on eight planets populated by a variety of organics this size and larger, but never had he seen one capable of true flight. Most of these organics took to the air in eerie near-silence, and Bumblebee could not detect their engines. It was amazing they could fly at all, really, and he could not help feeling vaguely sorry for the little things. Their wings weren't even attached properly, and wobbled up and down erratically.

What a strange planet.

When he sensed at last a flat ribbon, winding its way among the foothills below, he turned and made for it hopefully. Progress was slow but at last he pushed his way through a stand of flexing coal rods and there it was, smooth and undulating, a little higher than the rest of the silicate soil. There was water here as well - small dirty heaps of the powdered form and puddles of the liquid on either side of the ribbon. No, not a ribbon... a pathway.

He studied the crude alien structure for a few moments, scanning carefully. Before he could step out onto it, a distant purr of moving metal alerted him, and he stepped back behind some of the coal rods. After a few moments, a transport-frame mech came into visual range, running fast and low to the ground. He bore no faction markings of any kind, and... he contained an organic. One of the smooth ones, similar to the creatures which featured heavily in the background transmissions which Bumblebee continued to monitor. A servant, perhaps? Worker, slave, pet?

The mech was running loud, as if he gave no thought to stealth, and yet his EM field was no more complex than the faint aura found around all purified but unworked metal. Was the mech shielding himself somehow? Cognizant of his mission, his own field dampened, Bumblebee extended his sensors, applying just the slightest pressure to the mech's stark, simple field.

The smooth organic caged inside the mech reacted. The creature jabbed in at the frequency receptor device in front of it, displeased by the interference static. The mech itself, however, showed no sign at all of even noticing Bumblebee. Nor did it generate a field torque - which was... impossible, because even small pieces of living metal formed a field when signaled. Even simple drones made more response. But this mech...

No, not a mech. Dead metal.

Bewildered, Bumblebee watched the unliving... transport thing speed away. What use was so much blank metal, outside of a factory or simplest machining shop? He might as well have opened a comline to a wall. Or a wrench. Though on second thought, any wrench of Ratchet's would have been considerably more responsive.

After a short period of observation, Bumblebee came to the uncomfortable conclusion that these deadmetal drones were probably commonplace on this planet. One or two of them, oblivious, passed his hiding spot every minute. They were, he was forced to admit, probably quite fuel efficient - certainly moreso than walking or taking on his old altmode. If he masked his own energy signatures well, he might even conceal himself as one of them, and travel upon the pathway as they did. Such a route had to lead somewhere, didn't it?

It would mean shedding the last mode he'd taken - a hover-skiff, meant for traversing the wasted terrain of a sprawling civilization in its death throes. Bumblebee considered his battered forearm for a moment, turning his gauntlet over, sharp optics picking out transformation seams and chinks, pitted lightweight plates, badly-scraped baffles, the faint roughness of nodes many times damaged.

It had been... a long time since he'd reformatted his shell.

The Cybertronians had many glyphs for their own species. _Starcore-shifter, shell-warrior, living-wise-metal, sun-drinker, true-seeking-sojourner_, and a hundred more, each with modifier sets and accents of their own.

But the oldest of these, and the simplest, was nothing but a single sweep, a dynamic line. And it alone carried no qualifiers.

_Flux._

All metal could be made to live, of course, could be threaded through with capillaries and sensors, motivators and flexons. Once a part became integrated to him, it could be cut or soldered, could be added to or burned away. Nanites and medics could repair his components, programming could quicken them. Tensor cables could be dismantled and engines overhauled. With enough clever engineering, a weight-bearing strut could be positioned to support a strong back, or alternately be cogged into service as the hardened core of a blade; the exquisitely skilled could even employ that same component in a third form.

But not all metal flowed... adapted, evolved. Not all metal coiled and twisted and fanned infinitely to the call of will alone; not all metal could embrace a spark.

Fluxframe, protometal, the gestational origin of the shell, quantum entanglement of strangelets and superfluid starcore, the very essence of mutability. Every time a mech chose to create a new, permanent structure or incorporate a prebuilt one, the effort expended a measure of fluxmetal, however minute. And choosing an altmode - especially one at great variance to a mech's present form - consumed a great deal of it. A mech's fluxframe regenerated, to be sure, but so very slowly, and thus the decision to alter large parts of a shell was always made with deliberation.

Bumblebee had no such luxury of time.

Optics narrowed, gleaming greenish as Bumblebee queued up an intricately specialized assay program. It was used for one purpose alone.

Two more low-slung transports flashed along the cracked black pathway, each one containing its own smooth organic. The first of the dead metal drones was large, with a great deal of exterior plating. The second was much smaller, easier to copy. It crowded aggressively close to the lead transport, its internals thrumming a more insistent tone. After a moment it darted out and around the larger bot, obedient to some unseen command.

Bumblebee scanned it as it passed.

A flood of data swamped his cortex - schematics, internals, magnetic sequences; the transport was simple in many aspects, fantastically and bizarrely complex in others. As he'd suspected, the vehicle was rife with empty spaces, hollow compartments and niches where he could pack unused pieces. So far, he'd only observed deadmetal drones in association with the smooth organics, and so he left most of the central cabin design open like the original. There was a hinged cavity in the back, which seemed a suitable place for the mechabots. The rest, though - his CPU warmed as its banks of processors modeled a million configurations of internal components, testing theoretical assemblies, validating or discarding sequence after sequence. With every pass, the program improved its output, fine-tuning efficiency for this atmosphere and gravity.

Subroutines scavenged free clock cycles to catalogue Bumblebee's existing components, determining which could be retooled or adapted, which ones could be used as they were, and which must be kept inviolate. The list of parts which would need to be sculpted largely from fluxmetal was... distressingly long.

And he couldn't even reproduce all the components. The odd black wheels and many interior pieces of the deadmetal bot were made primarily of carbon, often compiled into rather complex arrangements. Bumblebee did carry some carbon, neatly assembled in nanotubules and buckyballs, but pulling those apart would be difficult. Putting them back together to make... that black stuff might be even harder. Even the most tractable nanite colonies could get really fussy about working with carbon, sometimes.

After a little thought, Bumblebee found a set of whipdisks from a close-combat weapon he rarely used, and designated them as replacements for the black wheels. The entire process took moments to complete. Bumblebee held the configuration quietly in his cortex for a few more, a meditative hesitation.

And then, with great deliberation, he let go - surrendering the data and his very form to his fluxframe, to his spark. It hurt - always did, the first time, as plates were sutured together, snapped apart. Air hissed uselessly through his vents as his frame compacted, folded, parts twisting, minute filaments breaking and regrowing with terrible speed. The long struts of his limbs folded under or arched over him, while silicate membranes annealed and stiffened. New cabling junctures crawled like snakes under his shifting armor, silver fluxmetal extrusions formed necessary new components.

Bumblebee onlined his optics, not sure when they'd blinked off. He felt... much shorter, and quite stiff. But also remarkably stable, and the new armor covered him completely - no need for vulnerable gaps around joints. The extra styling around his optics perhaps interfered a little with visual acuity, but not by much, and he could work on that. His sensors tingled faintly as chromatophore nanites set out on the long journey to colonize new parts of his surface armor, and the mechabots in his rear hatch space jostled for room. After a few unpleasant jabs from their miniature engineering tools, he reduced sensor detection in the chamber. Mechabots had slagging sharp little legs.

The transformation had gone well. Pleased with himself, Bumblebee rolled back and forth a few times, running self-diagnostics and testing his grip here on the side of the pathway - and nearly collided with his first upclose organic.

It was small, smaller than the smooth organics he'd already spotted. Its face was pointed as if it wore a battlemask; its optics were quite black. Though it was covered in a dense halo of keratin fibers and was trailed by a strange tuft of the same, it too seemed oddly reminiscent of a mining mech - with its a pair of small headcrests, two forefeet, two pedes, and sharp claws. It was as boldly striped as a racingbot.

Bumblebee froze. It had seen him transform, beyond a doubt. Its small optics gleamed as it sniffed at one of his wheels. First contact! And since he'd been discovered, sort of, perhaps he could enlist its aid. Jazz always took the ambassadorial role, was always out in front, and Bumblebee had envied him but never really imagined that he'd ever have a chance to - he had to - where the _slag_ were the protocols...

There they were. In triumph, Bumblebee presented the first of the new species transmissions: a series of exceedingly simple glyphs, a kind of pidgin common to most interstellar traders. /_Greetings. _ _We. Come. In. Peace._/ Along with that, he projected the faintly-glowing image of a cube of energon, universal symbol for hospitality and friendliness. Though, frankly, any intelligent life form might well take the small softlight hologram as a request, given how obviously low Bumblebee's power levels were.

The new alien organic nosed at one of his new, makeshift optics. Then another deadmetal drone flashed by on the nearby pathway. The drone's wheels made a fair amount of sound, and this appeared to startle Bumblebee's own organic. The creature huffed and began waddling away.

Which wasn't the way things were supposed to work at all - Bumblebee still had some six thousand eight hundred twelve peaceful greetings to try! He dispelled the hologram, and in an agony of indecision, approached his organic once more. His solid steel wheels crunched as they rolled from the asphalt and onto rocky, damp soil. Protocol number two was a quiet, soothing hum, offered across a broad range of electromagnetic and auditory frequencies.

The organic turned around and began to stamp its front two pedes, its tuft of keratin erect, tip flicking.

Much encouraged, Bumblebee initiated protocol number three - cycling his weapon coverings, in order to prove that his implements of war were offline and cold. Across his frame, hatches hissed open.

Bumblebee watched eagerly as the organic began its own transformation sequence: twisting around in a black and white blur, standing up onto its fore-pedes. It was a quick, smooth maneuver, clearly well-practiced. And then -

_/ ARRRRGH! /_

Metal wheels spun uselessly in the gravel as Bumblebee attempted to go in reverse from zero to sixty in a single astrosecond, flinging up a hailstorm of dust and debris. The- the weaponized liquid was everywhere, up inside his sensors, coating components in a film of reeking oil, blinding his primary set of optics, setting every single chemoreceptor on his entire frame to firing madly. It was worse than being eaten by a Telorian sandworm. Gears ground, slipped, and then Bumblebee rocketed forward, over a bump, found the pathway by the slightly spongy feel of it, left streaks of burning road tar and torn asphalt in a swath behind him as every self-preservation protocol urged escape. Mechabots dug their tiny claws into his hatch compartment, squeaking as they clung for their lives.

But the noxious mist clung to him, seemed to grow even stronger. The air wooshing through his vents spread the toxin - or acid, was it acid? - throughout his chassis. And his... there was... it was slippery and chunky and up inside and...

Oh.

Oh Primus, no.

He'd squished the organic ambassador.


	3. Chapter 3

_He'd squished the organic ambassador._

_No_. A metal barrier deflected Bumblebee's headlong flight with a terrible glancing screech. Deadmetal drones issued strident blatting calls of alarm as he dodged them on sensor outputs as scrambled as the time he'd been caught by Ironhide's backswing - and then Bumblebee hit the second railing head on.

The steel sheeting bowed like a flexspring and parted like the articulated links of a turbofox, and for the second time in an hour, he was airborne. Not for long, this time.

Bumblebee plowed into stony soil, armor plates crunching, organic and silicate particles and tiny bits of wet coal shafts flying everywhere. A boulder caught at one metal wheel, flung him over to tumble sideways, every shock and jolt and crash jarring away the concentration necessary to transform. He came to a juddering halt in a rocky streambed.

Dazed and battered, Bumblebee lay quiet, feeling water trickle through his dented fender - the one with the, coated with the... that one. He could feel the organic... residue being rinsed away, though the water did little for the stink. After a few moments, he eased his body through a fairly messy transformation, claws and armor slipping in the mud, mechabots chittering as they were jostled into new positions by the shift.

The feel of water - liquid, free-flowing, cold as space - filtering through his systems was intensely strange. As if the shallow stream were some kind of an oil bath, Bumblebee hesitantly dipped his afflicted systems into the liquid. That helped, a little. Within a few minutes, ranks of surface nanites began converting themselves into chemophages and set to scouring the worst of the burning biological oil from his components.

This planet, he decided, was going to take some getting used to.

...

The vehicle that crept back up onto the roadway was difficult to identify. Water growths, shrubs, and tufts of uprooted grass clung in every crack, and most of the car was plastered with mud. Several panels were dented, along with the roof. Bizarrely, the windshield was also dented, but not cracked, as if it were made of sterner stuff than mere glass.

The highway wasn't in much better shape. Jagged furrows had been carved into the surface, veering back and forth without apparent regard to the white or yellow lines. Most of the railing lining this bend was scattered in pieces along the talus slope below. Passing vehicles slowed and jounced over the scores cut into the blacktop.

Meekly, Bumblebee checked his presumptive, best-guess coordinates, and eased himself back onto the blasted roadway. Taking one last scan around - to be certain no more small striped ambassadors lay in wait - he rolled out to join the other deadmetal drones on their journey to places unknown. It was, uhm, fairly dark, right? So maybe the drones had not noticed what he'd done.

The rims of Bumblebee's wheels struck sparks or burned more tarmac when he tried to move too fast, and the hard edges allowed for only poor braking. He kept himself to a sedate and non-pathway-damaging speed accordingly, though the other drones on the pathway made their loud blatting sounds or flashed their optics. Bumblebee was uncertain how such deadmetal drones had developed even the capacity to display annoyance, if they were indeed doing so, but the group censure was profoundly dismaying all the same.

It took them some time, but at long last, his geosensors finished taking their thousands of bearings and measurements. A few microseconds of processing, and his own coordinates flashed up onto his HUD, matching up with a position on the crude map his mission specs had supplied.

One of the mission targets was less than a mile away.

Bumblebee slowed further, drawing more irate noises from the deadmetal drones, and pulled off onto the shoulder of the pathway. A smaller pathway, formed of pressed dirt and gravel, split from the black road and coiled itself up the side of a flat-topped mesa. There was, if he concentrated, a faint electrical trembling at the edge of his sensor net. Perhaps it came from up there?

Cautiously, Bumblebee started up. He immediately found himself missing the smooth black substance that lined the other pathway. The third time jagged chunks of stone scraped his undercarriage, he resorted to adapting his axles, lengthening his shocks to stand up higher. Even so, resorting to rootmode was beginning to look increasingly attractive by the time he reached the summit.

The air there hummed with charge. Not much by Cybertronian standards to be sure, but still enough to tingle across his receptors. The field seemed centered around a fragile, fenced building, capped by a large collector dish - that, at least, Bumblebee recognized, though it lacked almost all the usual reception-enhancing spines and extrusions. A spindly tower stood nearby, supporting a clawful of wires. The detectable transmissions were dense here, tightly clustered around certain spectra. But they were quite garbled, laden with numbers and figures that didn't seem as if they'd be useful - except, possibly, to a glitch-deranged seeker without control of his own location and flightpath sensors.

Maybe this structure was used to guide all the miniature organic wobble-winged seekers. Primus knew they could use it, fluttering around and wasting fuel as they did.

Spindly, sharp legs poked at the inside of his storage compartment, and with some trepidation, Bumblebee opened the hatch. Chittering angrily, the mechanobots boiled out, all pointed claws and bulbous bodies. The two on top jabbed at their fellows, shoving them back inside, then skittered up in unison to slam the lid down to a chorus of irritated clicks. Haughtily, the triumphant pair of bots made a derogatory circuit of Bumblebee's thoroughly-soiled chassis, then one skittered sideways towards the tower. The other darted towards the collector-dish building, spidery silver legs glinting as it scaled the tiny chain-link fence and then the side of the dish.

Bumblebee made himself comfortable - so much as he could, given the lingering stink - and waited. It would take the bots a few minutes to... do whatever they were programmed to do, and he wasn't certain if he were meant to collect them afterwards. Meanwhile, he examined the background transmission more carefully.

Some bandwidths carried... music, voices, maybe spoken word-glyphs, and he set his translator routines to working on those as best they could. None of the simple melodies approached the sheer mathematical complexity of a cybertronian symphony, but some of them were quite catchy. Jazz would like them, he thought, recording some of the more interesting ones. He'd transmit them to Jazz when he returned from this mission. Bumblebee allowed himself to dwell on that happy process for moment - the Ark would pick him up, he'd be back with crew and commander and Prime. He might even be allotted a good high-pressure solvent spray. Maybe three cubes of energon - no, four. And oh, an oil bath would feel... indescribably good. He might even receive commendations for a mission like this - provided he hadn't glitched up relations with the organics too badly.

Though running over the very first one he met... well. That was probably a fragup in any culture.

Bumblebee rocked sideways a little, trying to determine what the mechabots were up to, exactly. The sky was starting to lighten, now, with sunlight. The atmosphere was so thick, it refracted and filtered the yellow rays of light, turning the horizon into a glowing streak of crimson and gold. It looked, he thought, a lot like one of the huge three-dimensional landscapes, formed of constantly moving nanites, which once had hung in the Iacon Towers. Mirage had shown him an image of one, once.

Teletraan interrupted. The transmission came by entangled particle.

_/Request: status report. Code confirmation./_

Bumblebee brightened. Quickly making the calculations from the last seed he'd been issued, he replied first with the encoded datastream that confirmed his identity. _/Safe, on-planet, low fuel. No Decepticon sign. Contact made with local organic.../_ he paused, _/...potential diplomatic error committed. Requesting conference and mission confirmation with Prime../_

Teletraan returned the sending promptly. _/Negative./_

Bumblebee hesitated. _ /Requesting conference and mission confirmation with commander Jazz./_

_/Negative./_

Bumblebee's cool military glyphs faltered. _ /Teletraan. What - what happened to -/ _

_/Classified./ _ The ship was silent a moment. _/Mission remains authorized. First priority: distribute mechabots at determined locations. Second: search out any hint as to the location of the allspark. Wait for further instruction. Remain as hidden as possible./_

_/Teletraan. But what about -/_

_/Classified. Awaiting satellite uplink in twenty-five astroseconds./_

Bumblebee couldn't even grit his jaws in this form - not that he really could even when in rootmode, but still. _ /Teletraan. *What* satellite? And what do you mean, classified? In the last few hours, I've been attacked by an organic which apparently really, really doesn't like energon. Or holograms, or sound, I'm not sure which. And there are these rods of coal all over the place, so thick and just *everywhere* that I have to stay on these pathways used by some kind of drones made *entirely* of dead metal, which I can't even copy right, because.../_

The doors of one of those very same deadmetal drones slammed behind him. Bumblebee started, twitching a little, but it was clear that the smooth organics and their transport had already spotted him. The drone said nothing, but the humans were producing sounds in the audible range, much like those which clogged the radio-wave transmissions. Slag it all. His sensors were still glitched up, but how had he failed to notice...

_/Uplink complete. Use the following frequency to access organic basic information systems. Prepare to receive translation software for your location. Comm only in emergency. Teletraan out./ _

_/What!/ _ Bumblebee started, fighting not to edge away as the organics came closer. So help him Primus, if this one stood on its front legs and hissed like the little black and white one, he was getting the slag out of here. He'd drive right through these cubicle buildings, if he had to.

And then one of them laid a hand on his hood.

The organic was... surprisingly, shockingly warm, unlike any variety of biological life form that he knew, as hot as the best oil bath. The pale parts of it were made of much more complex things than the colored parts, and the former apparently had been dipped in a mixture of oils, salts, and water. The fingerprint residue on his armor was not uncomfortable, exactly - certainly not corrosive enough to harm him, even in an environment with so much oxygen. But it did taste strange to his chemoreceptors - the ones still functional after that bioweapon attack. Bumblebee hoped fervently that the organic had not... secreted something onto him, perhaps to mark its territory. Maybe this was its lubricant?

Its front pede bore only the smallest, most rudimentary talons. How did the creature defend itself? And... oh. Oh. He could feel its primary fuel pump. Maybe the secondary too, since the echoing pulse throbbed with two-beat tempo. Impossible, just impossible that he could feel such a thing through another creature's armor.

He wondered, inanely, if it had no armor. Sparklings that size didn't have much. But none at all?

"...some kid's Camaro? Left out here, up on rims and squeezed through the grinder? Nah, gotta be a drug runner." The words were more in the bass range than the metal squeal of cybertronian, so slow they seemed more weighty than proper for such a small creature. Bumblebee started decompressing the translation protocols the instant Teletraan completed each file.

"Betchya it ran real far on rims, huh Mack?" Bumblebee held himself quite still as another pair of hands joined the first, swiping away the grime spattered over one of his windows. The tickling-touch raised a charge in its wake, several sensor relays urging him to brace for a strike, others luxuriating in the warmth. "Inside's torn up real bad."

"Huh. Yeah." Fingers slid into one of the covered notches on his side. The organic tried to pry up, and Bumblebee fought down a tickling shudder. "Looks like someone took a sledge to it. Locked, though. I don't see any keys."

More fingers prodded at the juncture of the top of his side window, feeling for any gap between it and his roof. It felt fragging strange - such a light, tickling touch, slightly giving, but fairly solid underneath. And warm, bumping lightly over a proximity-sensor node. "So what, kids come up here for some nookie, leave their ride, but walk off with the wheels? Don't make sense, Mack. Could maybe get a coathanger in here."

"You gotta coathanger? Didn't think so. Look, if there are bodies folded up in the trunk, you really want your fingerprints all over the thing? I'm going to call the cops, let them deal with this. Oughta be able to get here by the time we finish checking the generator."

The first organic vented, and Bumblebee could feel the expelled heat of its engines. Internals. Whatever. "Yeah, I guess. Too bad - pretty piece, if anyone bothered to fix her up. Hate to see her sit around an impound lot. Or just get compacted." The organic moved around to the front of him, and tried to wedge its tiny, flexing talons under the joint of his hood. The touch against the inside rim of his largest armor plate was lingering and soft.

"Like you don't already have enough crap lying around your yard," said the second organic, removing a primitive comm node from inside its colored parts, and activating it. It proceeded to vocalize into the device, its individual sounds just as slow as before.

Bumblebee finished integrating the translation software, and waited eagerly for the organics to say something else. The organic grunted some kind of affirmation into the comm node several times, and then cut the node's connection and obliged him. "Well, the authorities'll be here in fifteen to take it back to town. The plates haven't been reported missing. We gotta stick around till then. Said they might bring a dog, too, look for bodies or whatever."

"Fuck."

"Yeah. Better get to work. Christ knows we won't get anything done once they get here."

Bumblebee held himself quite still. Not only did the organics plan to remove him to a population center - surely there was more technology there, perhaps even more mission coordinates - but they also intended to introduce him to their ruling elite. Possibly one of their Primes too, who evidently knew what processes would be completed. He wasn't sure what the status of the energon serving utensils had to do with anything, but he was pleased that they were not missing. And then there would be a fuck with this 'dog', which could find large things, all of which sounded like an interesting ritual. Odd, admittedly, but you took what you could get with organics.

Bumblebee released a slow vent as the warm organics opened a gate in the fence and began moving about with their primitive tools. Finally, *finally*, he was getting somewhere.


End file.
